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tv   Book TV  CSPAN  July 30, 2011 10:00pm-11:00pm EDT

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quorum call:
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the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. reid: i ask unanimous consent the call of the quorum be terminated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. reid: first of all i appreciate everyone's patience in one of the most difficult times we find in the history of our country. mr. president, there are knowings going on at the white house to avert a catastrophic default on the nation's debt. there are many elements to be finalized and there is still a distance to go before any arrangement can be completed. but i believe we should give everyone as much room as possible to do their work. i spoke to the white house, quite a few times this evening, and they've asked me to give everyone as much time as
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possible to reach an agreement if one can be reached. for that reason we'll hold over the vote until tomorrow at noon to give them more time to talk. in fact, we'll come in at noon and have the vote at 1:00. i'm glad to see this move toward cooperation and compromise. i hope it bears fruit. i'm confident that a final agreement that will adopt the senate's long-term approach rather than the short-term band-aid proposed by the house of representatives will move forward. there can be no short-term agreement and i'm optimistic there will be no short-term arrangement whatsoever. i'm also confident that reasonable people from both parties should be able to reach an agreement, and i believe we should give them time to do so. mr. president, i ask unanimous consent that the cloture vote on the reid motion to concur in the house amount to s. 26 627 with amendment 528 occur tomorrow at 1:00 p.m. and further that the rule be waived. the presiding officer: is there
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objection? hearing none, it is so ordered. mr. reid: i note the absence of a quorum. the presiding officer: the clerk will call the roll. quorum call:
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the presiding officer: the majority leader. mr. reid: i ask unanimous consent the quorum call be terminated. the presiding officer: without objection. mr. reid: let me take a minute with the presiding officer. it's not often that we see with the distinguished chairman of our armed services committee presiding, so it's glad to see you still know how to do it. i would also say just in passing that the state of michigan is so fortunate to have you and frankly, your brother, serving in congress. and i don't think -- i know there are lots of things people want to talk about tonight, but i think it's worth saying and my friend has heard me say it before, i was making a decision whether or not i would run for the senate. and i visited the senator from michigan in his office. and i said, you know, i came to
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washington and served with your brother, sander levin, and you said, i've reminded several times, yes, he's my brother but also my best friend. mr. president, i appreciate who you are and all you have done for our country. i ask unanimous consent that when the senate completes its business, it adjourn until 12:00 p.m. on sunday, july 31. the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day. following any leader remarks, the senate resume consideration on the motion to concur in the house message to accompany s. 627, the legislative vehicle for the debt limit increase, with the time until 1:00 p.m. equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees. the presiding officer: is there objection? hearing none, it is so ordered. mr. reid: the roll call vote on the motion to accompany message s. 627 with the reid amendment will occur at approximately 1:00 p.m. tomorrow. i would note, mr. president,
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that if cloture is not invoked, the debate will continue on the reid amendment. if there is no further business to come before the senate, i ask that it adjourn under the previous order. the presiding officer: without objection, the senate stands adjourned until noon tomorrow. >> the senate has been debating senate democratic leader reid's plan to move the debt ceiling. a vote has been theyed until tomorrow afternoon at 1 eastern to give more talks for talks about his bill, also more time for negotiations between the white house and senate republican leader mitch mcconnell. so until the senate comes back in, we're going to join booktv in progress. >> on a recent visit to charleston, south carolina, booktv took a look at the charleston library society.
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>> oldest circulating library in the united states, and the oldest cultural institution of any kind in the south. it was originally founded by 19 young men here in charleston as a way to get books and publications shipped from london. they collected together, pooled their resources. it became one of the most important cultural institutions in town very quickly. um, it helped found the college of charleston, it directly founded the charleston museum which is america's first museum. it became a center for learning. there are many early natural historians, bachmann, audubon set up camp here in charleston, and the library society was kind of their home base. so it was an early center for science and learning in the colony. most of the founding fathers from south carolina, signers of the constitution, signers of the declaration of independence were all library society members on
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our board, very active members, plenty of them. we have lots of their letters and papers in our collection today. so these are a handful of letters that we have that are from george washington. this entire series of correspondence is with charles cotesworth pinckney, and time and time again washington tried to recruit pinckney to serve in the new national government. this is from 1791, and this is a letter to pinckney and his friend, edward rutledge, asking if they would join the supreme court. rutledge's brother had just kind of gotten warped from the court, and washington basically says you won't be paid anything, you won't get a lot of respect, but if either of you two guys would like to come up here and be supreme court justices, we'd love to have you, it would be a great addition to the court. neither of them did. they were happy to stay here and keep maintenance on their crops which was much more profitable and probably much more enjoyable than moving north, in their
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opinion. he again asked pinckney if he would become secretary of war a few years later. he asked him if he would become secretary of state the year after that. pinckney says, no dice. and finally, 1796, he says, charles, you've turned down every other job i've offered you, how about minister of france? we like to joke it was probably his wife influenced the decision, yes. absolutely. pinckney finally respond with the a positive answer to washington and became the minister to france, kind of a funny series of, funny series of letters. there's another great one that, from the pinckney correspondence. he was friends with john marshall, pinckney was a hard core federalist, and during the early 19th century, you know, jefferson swept the south. south carolina went for jefferson.
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it joined the early democratic republicans. but her original founding fathers remained heavily, heavily federalist. and so there's this great letter from john marshall which i'll read a little bit off of, off of the transcript. that, um, they talk about some of their old contacts together, and, um, marshall says, you know, the new political year is here, mr. jefferson will be inaugurated soon, and then the letter stops. there's this break at 4:00, as you can see in the letter. 4:00 break. he stops, and then he goes back to write, i've administered the oath to the president. this is actually his inauguration day letter. and before and after the inauguration he's complaining about how terrible a president jefferson will be. but anyhow, comes back, comes back to finish off the letter. and one more from pinckney, which is kind of entertaining. pinckney was also good friends
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with that chief federalist, with alexander hamilton. and this is 1802, the federalists have, um, have been run out of office. this is the end of 1802. jefferson is soon to be president, and hamilton writes to pinckney, pinckney's got a big plantation down here. and says, my dear sir: regarding, as you know, as a disappointed politician, this is hamilton saying he's going to retire from public life which, of course, he didn't do. but he's asking pinckney to send him seeds. he had just bought a new plantation house of his own in new york. he was going to plant a garden, set up shop and forget about politics. we all know how alexander hamilton wound up, maybe he would have been better if he'd just retired to his garden. a few other things from the collection, let's see, there's, um, john craigton's view of
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carolina. we've got a lot of things from the early colonies that are of national importance, but it is a charleston institution, it's a south carolina institution, so there are some great documents. this is the original manuscript copy, and you can see the shape it's in. we're absolutely open to conservation donations. this is the original manuscript copy of his view of carolina. he was one of the first governors of the early republican period of south carolina, and much the same as thomas jefferson's famous notes on virginia,dreighton drove all over south carolina by carriage checking things out, surveying everything, taking useful social statistics and tried to come up with a scientific and geographic view of what south carolina really was. and in a lot of ways dreighton
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was fundamental in founding the university of south carolina, and a lot of this book would be his argument that south carolina needed a centralized capital. he would go on to be one of the founders of columbia. so this manuscript was kind of his foundational document. let's see, there are in mixed condition, a whole handful of great maps in here. there's his map of charleston at the time which this would have been 1802. but this, this book is his survey of exactly what the young south carolina, the state of south carolina is, and the whys and where fores of moving its capitol, so a fairly interesting document. and for just a little bit of our 20th century collection, the charleston renaissance of the 1920s which produced hayward and porgi, josephine pinckney,
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plenty of notable writers here in the charleston area, the foundation of the poetry society, a lot of that took place here at the library society. they all would have been members. this was the only library in town until the 1930s, so this was their library, this was their hangout. and this is the original manuscript copy of the handwritten first draft with all of hayward's side notes in it. all of his little annotations. and most notably, his dialect charts. now be pretty universeally held as its own language, as having proper instructions. at the time it wasn't, but when you see hayward writing in it, he's always sensitive to try and be consistent, to try and
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acknowledge when you read porgi and when you see it in its supreme ford, when it finally becomes porgy and bess, you can tell he is immersed in the language, and he treats it respectfully. and here's kind of the foundation of that as he tries to, as he tries to make sure that even he is consistent, that he keeps the rhythms, the names, the spellings, the pronunciations the same throughout the work. today we still exist as kind of a hybrid institution. we have many things like a historical society, we have that great core historical collection which we've kept for over 250 years, but we're also a circulating library. there's novels, books on tape, we're people's neighborhood library, so it's an interesting place for people to be able to work very high levels of history and culture that are always on display. and with their daily lives, there's not a lot of places you can go to pick up a cheap dime
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novel or a dvd to watch over the weekend, and when you go to the front desk, there's also a george washington letter sitting there, and people get to stop and read it. so it's a great way you kind of get history in your life every day as a library society member. >> for more information on booktv's recent trip to charleston, south carolina, visit c-span.org/local content. >> with titles like slander, godless, guilty, and her latest, demonic, ann coulter has something to say. now sunday, august 7th, your chance to talk to, e-mail and tweet "the new york times" beth-selling author and sindh dated -- syndicated columnist ann coulter for three hours. live, sunday, august 7th at noon eastern live on c-span2. >> susan millar williams and
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stephen to be crouse are the authors of a book we spoke to in charleston, south carolina. >> the largest earthquake ever to hit the east coast of the united states. there were three epicenters, they were all within 10 or 15 miles of charleston, south carolina. but the earthquake itself was felt all over the east coast. there was panic in new york city, in chicago, in detroit, um, richmond had a riot because all the prisoners at state penitentiary demanded to be released, and the story went out that there was a riot going on, and 10,000 people descended on the penitentiary with guns trying to put down what they thought was an uprising. all through the southeast and even down to cuba, they were
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seeing flashes of light that came from the earthquake and glasses were shaking off of the, um, shelves. so it was huge. >> and, in fact, it caused a lot of havoc in the area around charleston that was not known outside of charleston. that night, it's an interesting time for the earthquake to hit was the city and -- because the city and the world is sort of on the cusp of modernity, and they are used to have instantaneous communication through telegraph. but as you get closer and closer to charleston, you get more and more dramatic effects. the most dramatic to me were the what they called the fan blows or liquefaction factors, geysers that shot up as much as two stories in the air. and the biggest pocket of those was actually around ten mile hill which is right near where the charleston international airport is today. >> fissures hundreds of feet
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long were breaking open in the ground, railroad trains were being toppled, um, major damage all around the area. and surprisingly, not that many people killed. probably 60 some that night, eventually more than 100. the numbers are a little vague because a lot of people the records never quite came in the. but over 100 people killed. >> it's a huge international story. people seem to have sort of forgotten about this disaster in the wake of the san francisco earthquake in 1906, exactly 20 years later. but it was truly an earthquake that had implications across the united states and was national, international news. it was a big story. >> how did the city respond? what did they do? >> for a long time they didn't know what to do. the city council didn't meet for days. everybody that night fled from
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their houses, went out into the streets, stayed in any open space they could find, sleeping in the streets, sleeping in the city parks. a lot of people went out to stay on ships that were in the harbor um, and then they started to go back to their homes in the morning, and the aftershocks drove them right back out again into the streets. so people stayed away from their homes for several days, and in a city as racially charged as charleston, remember, it's only 21 years after the end of the civil war and ten years after the end of reconstruction when whites took back all the government in south carolina, um, there were, there were tensions among everyone, and, um, the parks were integrated the night of the earthquake, and they quickly broke into white camps and black camps, um, with people separated by who they
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felt comfortable with. but they stayed out in the streets for days until the city leaders were demanding that they go back saying you are not going to be damaged by falling plaster. you have much more of a chance of getting a problem from exposure to the elements in the parks than if you're at home with your cracked ceilings. >> and they did initially sort of act like they were paralyzed to some extent, but they did get around to realizing that they were going to have the provide relief. that was something that charleston, white charleston was really opposed to at first, but this was clearly such a big disaster that though they had had a huge hurricane in exactly a year before in 1885 and refused national relief at that time, they decided they were going to have to accept all of the money that was coming in and, first, provide food for
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people. so they established soup kitchens, they established a commissary where they hand out free food, dry food that people could come and get. and they were very proud of themselves for sort of getting this enormous effort set up. they provided tents. it's a little hard to get tents. they built wooden shelters. when they finally do gear up, it is a sort of efficient bureaucracy. um, but by our standards today it did have some flaws. >> well, it was fumbling. they would set up a program, and then the next day they would junk it and say, no, no, no, we've got to do something totally different. and 24 hours they'd junk that and set up something entirely new again. as with a lot of disasters, a lot of the story is one or two people, especially one, taking charge and kind of saying this is how we are going to do it. and in charleston that person
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was francis warington doffin, the editor of the local newspaper, the charleston news and courier, who was working everywhere. his family was out of town, so he was relatively free to do it, and he was the leading figure on the relief committee that distributed the money as the newspaper editor. he sent the word out around the world, and people sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to him personally for him to distribute however it needed to be done. and he convinced everybody in the city who were moping around and saying, oh, my god, we are devastated by this earthquake. a year ago the hurricane, the civil war, we're cursed. and he rallied everybody and said, no, we're not cursed, and we can recover from be this, we can rebuild, and we can make charleston as great today as it was yesterday. and he's the one that convinced people that they could rebound, and they could recover. >> and he's a very interesting
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guy, too, because he was british. he's a transplant. and charleston traditionally did not take well to -- [inaudible] as they still called them. but he had come over to fight for the confederacy, and he stayed because he really felt that he could make good here in a way that he never could back in england. and so he doesn't really share native south carolinians' prejudices in a lot of ways. he's married to a very unreconstructed woman from baton rouge who actually wrote one of the great diaries from the civil war, and he is, um, sort of on both sides of the fence. he is able to talk to people who are from various classes, various races. he does take a lot of stands for social justice that are unexpected, and yet, um, he is still very much a man of his time. >> and he's, and he's a huge
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figure in the democratic party at the time. in the 1880s the democratic party was, in the south, was the party of white people. and the republican party which was lincoln's party was the party of black people and a very few whites who came down, um, the people everybody talks about as being carpetbaggers. he was the leader of the democratic party not just in south carolina, but in the south, and he had helped get grover cleveland elected president of the united states. so he was, he was well known around the country, and when he put out the word and said we need help, people responded. and money came flooding in from all around the country, from england, from japan, the queen of england sent her condolences. um, everybody responded. and one of the things that triggered that was the fact that it was 21 years after the end of the civil war, and a lot of former union soldiers in the
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north kind of banded together and got in touch with the people in charleston and said we will send you money, we will send you supplies, we will even send you armed troops who will take post all through the city of charleston. and won't that come -- [inaudible] [laughter] and the response from charleston was, thanks anyway. we can get along just fine without having more u.s. government troops in the streets. [laughter] that is not going to help us. >> but they do, in fact, um, the north and the south take this up as a sort of cause. they, white south carolinians particularly see it as a way to reunite with the north for business reasons, and the north sees it as a way to reunite with south carolina which they continually say, oh, we tried to destroy that, um, miserable city 20 years ago. [laughter] the cradle of secession.
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now we want to help, help clean it up, and we want to make amends. we want to reconnect. so for white people this is a great triumph. for black people it's a real threat. what that means is that they are conveniently uniting to forget the causes of the civil war, to turn their backs on, um, the movement for black equality which has had, um, a pretty good run. and so it's a very turbulent moment in the city's history. >> well, and the white city leaders, they're reaching out to are all former confederate officers. those are the people who are running the city. and when they put up a relief committee to help all the people in the city, even though the city is 60% black at this point, they put no black people on any of the committees. a small town near here that's actually closer to the epicenter than charleston, summerville, put black people on their relief
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committees. but on charleston they did not even consider it. and there was a really strong effort, especially led by black ministers here, to try to say we can reach the people who need the help better than you can, let us help you find them. and the city leaders said, no thanks. we do not need your help. labor was a very big thing. the whole city of charleston was being organized by the knights of labor which was a labor organization that was active all around the country. and they said we're in touch with laborers in charleston. they're the ones who are injured and whose houses have been damaged. let us help you. and the city told them, we don't need your help either. we can take care of it ourselves. and they put the word out around the country, we know what's going on, we can take charge of it. send the money to us, and we will take care of it for you. >> so there was actually going to be -- that was actually going
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to be my next question. when they were divvying out, it's already, like you said, a racially charged environment. when it came down to, um, giving out the provisions, my assumption is it didn't happen equally, yet 60% of the population, like you said, was black. how did -- i'm sure that didn't help the situation. >> there was a lot of wrangling over what made people worthy of aid. and they went to a lot of trouble to try to determine if people were able to work. that really troubled people. and the reason it troubled people was that they were afraid that if they gave people food and shelter, they would have no reason to help clean up the city. um, it's a kind of bonus for, um, laborers. it's a moment when all of a sudden they can come in double, triple wages. people need their work. and so suddenly it's a very polarizing situation. and all sorts of meanings attach to relief.
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in fact, they really were pretty equitable, i think, about giving out food. >> the commissary and the food, um, kitchen, the soup kitchen that they were running, the vast majority of the people who were in line for it were black people. and they pointed that out on a regular basis. but on the other hand, of course they were. um, they were the ones who had fewer supplies at home that they could draw on. they were the ones who were in frame buildings that were in much worse shape and that were more easily damaged. even though a brick building, um, will crumble where a wood building will, is more flexible in an earthquake, buildings that are already in bad repair are going to fall. and lots of low income people's frame buildings did fall during the earthquake. >> so you mentioned, um, francis
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warington dawson. you said he had joined, he had come to the u.s. to join the confederacy, and now here he is during the the earthquake, he's, you know, trying to get aid to black people. how did that go over with his fellow confederates? >> dawson is a very powerful figure, and during this period he seems to be able to lead public opinion partly because he's just so energetic, you know? they're all squashed. they, they're wanting to go home and take care of their own families and their own needs, and it all seems sort of like a burden. and dawson comes out, um, fighting and really concerned about people's needs. he also is one of the people, though, who is always saying, you know, we don't want any idle hands here. we don't want to give any money or any food to people who can work. so at this moment in the earthquake he's regarded as a hero. >> can and on the earth -- and on the earthquake relief
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committee lots of people are proposing let's shut it down right now. let's stop giving out money to all these people. and dawson is one of the main figures who is still saying these people are still suffering, we have to keep giving money out much longer. they were ready to shut down the relief effort in about a week to ten days from when they first set it up. and as it was, they shut it down less than a month after they set it up. after they needed to the country -- pleaded to the country, we really need your aid and your support. and less than a month later they decided that giving free shelter and free food was keeping people from making the repairs that were necessary in charleston. and a little suffering would actually be helpful for the city because it will push people into making the repairs for the salaries that the richer people in the city were more willing to pay. >> and, in fact, um, the people
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who are arguing against this optimistic view are mostly black ministers who are writing to newspapers, black newspapers mostly in the north, and who are saying, you know, they're not telling the whole story. it's really worse than they're reporting. dawson himself writes to his wife in switzerland repeatedly, it's really a lot worse than we're, we're telling in the newspaper. >> and if you were living here, you would either be dead or in a lunatic asylum. you couldn't have stood it. and many people have that problem. there were all kinds of reports of earthquake-induced insanity with people, um, just fleeing -- lot of people actually died of fright according to the newspaper accounts. and the death records that the doctors in town -- >> or committed suicide as a result of the earthquake. and, in fact, all of this was
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ratcheted up a good deal when, um, the national newspapers were suddenly filled with the predictions of a man named ezekiel stone wiggins who was a self-proclaimed weather professor fete and -- prophet and who predicted that the greatest earthquake ever seen, much larger than the charleston earthquake, was going to hit the united states on september 29th. of course, remember, they're still having aftershocks, they're certainly willing to believe that, um, the most insane things can happen. and wiggins' prediction actually dovetails with the prediction of a nameless black woman in liberty county, georgia, who supposedly sat up in her coffin on the night of the earthquake and predicted that the world was going to end on september 29th. so a kind of hysteria really sweeps the country. it's certainly not local. it's people in michigan and in galveston, texas, and in new
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orleans. >> people in michigan climb up, they build a big platform up in the air. they climb up into it, um, parents and children. they put on ascension robes so that when the world ends, they will be well-dressed when they go up into heaven. they take a picnic lunch with them in case it doesn't come right away or in this case they need a little something to eat on their way to heaven, and can they just sit there and wait. and this was really happening all around the country. there are lot of stories about the gulf coast where they're doing this. charleston, all work came to a standstill. lots of people said we don't have to do any work at all because we're not going to be around here in another week. and that day, of course, everybody is standing there watching their watches and the clocks on the church towers just waiting to see what's going to happen. and what happened was nothing.
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[laughter] and then they had to go back to work and say, so the world is not going to end. now what are we going to do? how are we going to repair the city, and how are we going to live together? >> so how long did it take for the city to recover? >> you know, they claim that they were completely recovered a year later. >> they put on a huge exposition, a big gala week where they announced come and see how we have recovered. there is no sign of damage anymore, and everything is all better. we're back to business one year later. >> but if you read "the new york times" and places that don't have so much of an agenda, they're saying look around. [laughter] there's still a lot of damaged buildings. they really have not recovered as well as they are giving out. and, of course, if you look around the city now and read the papers, everything was sort of patched up hastily, and we are still dealing with shoddy repairs from the earthquake. >> yeah.
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so 125 years later we're still having to go back and make repairs on the building that had been done poorly right after the earthquake. the city hall, um, lots of the school buildings are now, they have studied them, they have determined that they couldn't survive an earthquake as strong as we had in 1886. they've moved all the children off of those school, from those schools off of the peninsula, and they've got to make repairs. and on a lot of buildings they're probably going to have to tear them down and rebuild them because what we had was not sufficient to survive again. >> the city, actually, did, um, move on from be providing food to -- from providing food to providing money for repairs. and they would send out inspectors, and they would give people vouchers to do these repairs. if you go back and look at those records, they still exist. a lot of the time the inspectors would come in and say, no,
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really, this is not adequate repairs. and the homeowner would sign off on it anyway, and everybody would just sort of agree to go on. they wanted so badly to be back in a kind of normal situation. and i can certainly understand why. but that was the second phase of relief. and be i think it's what the city -- and i think it's what the city was trying to fast guard to after they got through that initial free food and shelter phase. >> one, we worked on the book together for 1 is 1 years -- 11 years. we would work on the story of the earthquake and think that that was the full story, and then realize that we had to go out a little bit further, we had to go two and a half years later. the heros of the earthquake, frank dawson, was murdered. in his trial was this huge event that was covered all around the country to understand why people reacted the way they did, we had to go back to 1876 and 1865.
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and so the story kept getting bigger and bigger. but one of the things that we liked the most were the little stores, the little elements in it. we're speaking right now in the wentworth mansion which is one of the grand buildings and great hotels in all of charleston. um, and it was actually under construction in 1886, nearly completed when the earthquake happened. you can still walk around and see pieces of stained glass that are warped because of the shifting of the building that happened the night of the earthquake. the man who was building it, um, came under attack because lots of people said we are out in the streets, you know, we are living under tents and under canvas and look at the place that you have. you are not doing enough to reach out to us and to help us in our suffering. and it was a small battle going
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on in charleston at the time. the man who built the billing here was on city council, he had set up the first paid fire department, real professional fire department in charleston. and he quit city council in part because of the criticism that he was getting here. all of the small tensions that would have -- that always exist in any city suddenly when there's a that muchal disaster like this -- there's a natural disaster like this, the first reaction is, oh, let's all reach out, and let's all work together. and the second reaction is that those tensions just get bigger and bigger and bigger. people don't forget them. in fact, they kind of take advantage of the chaos that's going on right now to work with those tensions and make them bigger. >> so, actually, can we go back and talk about what, ultimately, happened to dawson? >> sure.
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>> frank dawson was under attack after the earthquake. he was, um, under attack really from what we would consider the left and the right at the time. he became the target of a man who would eventually go on to be a u.s. senator, benjamin tillman. he was a very colorful character with very salty language. >> pitchfork ben tillman. >> although he was not called "pitchfork accounts" at the time, and he did not hold office at the time. but they actually established a rival newspaper to try to bring dawson down. and there were some wonderful sort of pitched battles on the steps of city hall where, um, tillman stood up there and attacked dawson, and dawson tried to defend himself and really was not nearly as good a speaker as tillman and had the sort of crummy british accent that made him seem more alien. so you would have thought that what was happening was entirely
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political. he had all sorts of enemies in the city. and, ultimately, what happened to him was very tawdry and mundane. he had a young swiss woman that his wife had brought back from switzerland in 1887 who was living in the house and who, apparently, had a kind of sexual magnetism that is not apparent in her pictures. her name was elaine. everybody but frank and sara seemed to realize that she was a knockout and that she stopped traffic, but she caught the attention of their next door neighbor, a man named dr. thomas ballard mcdowell, who was married and had a child but who started stalking her and immediately saying i want to marry you. i'll divorce my wife and marry you which was patently absurd because south carolina at that time did not even allow divorce. so he stalks elaine, and, um, in
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the meantime he has tried to hire his brother as a hitman to kill her or wealthy father-in-law -- her wealthy father-in-law and then kill her. actually, he's going to poison his wife. there's all this sort of farcical drama going on, and dawson gets wind of the fact that she is seeing somebody unsuitable. >> and so he goes over to the doctor's office, he knocks on the door, introduces himself because they've never met before. he says, i understand that you are making improper advancements on someone in my household, and i insist that you stop. he wrapped him -- rapped him on the head with his cane. the doctor staggered back a few steps, reached into his pocket, pulled out a gun that he conveniently was carrying and shot him dead in his office. freaked out when he did that and immediately, um, got rid of the hat, got rid of the cane, threw them down into the privy, took
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dawson's body be, tried to figure out what to do with it. so he went into a closet, pulled up the floor boards, started digging up the soil that was underneath the floor boards, took dawson's body and jammed it under the floor boards, scraping the face. but he couldn't fit him under the floor board, so he dragged him back out again, scraping the face again, and eventually he goes to the police and acknowledges that he has killed captain dawson. there's panic in the streets, people start saying we need to go, um, murder the man who has just murdered captain dawson. and as they are marching down to do it, people say, wait a minute, captain dawson fought against dueling and wanton violence all his life. this is exactly what he would not want us to do. they dispersed. there was a trial a couple of months later, and dawson's
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killer was found not guilty, and he, in fact, lived in if charleston -- in charleston for almost 20 years more. and the whole story of that has to do with the whole story of charleston and the tensions in the charleston and the trust or lack of trust that people had with each other and with dawson. and it's also the story of the coming of jim crow when segregation is going to be made legal by plessy v. ferguson, the supreme court decision that came down in 1896. and it all kind of, the jury that acquits the physician is a mixed-race jury, but whites here and around the country say that's what happens when you let blacks on the jury. we have to get them off, and they make a move to strip away all of the rights and opportunities that blacks in south carolina have received.
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>> so you mentioned it took you 11 years to write this book. how did you come to the story to begin with? >> well, one of my students at the college of charleston, this is many year ago -- 1988 -- wrote a paper about the earthquake. i had just moved to the area, and i had never even known that there was an earthquake. the a very good paper. it was a very good paper. and i thought it was publishable, but i lost track of her. there are and a year later -- and a year later my town and the rest of south carolina was hit by hurricane hugo. and as i thought about what was playing out all around me after hurricane hugo, i kept thinking, gee, i wish i knew more about the earthquake because so much of this seems to be repeating itself. i was writing another book at that point, went on to finish that and, um, years later steve and i started talking about it. i thought i might write it as a novel. i went back to the papers and started trying to figure out what was going on.
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there were all these troubling questions. um, we couldn't figure out why people were behaving in the way they were behaving. um, to take one example, there was an episcopal minister who on one of the nights they were camping out after the earthquake heard some black people singing hymns outside his, um, encampment. and it made him furious. and he went out and said if you don't stop singing those hymns, i'm going to beat you with my walking cane. and, um, the people who were singing the hymns just sort of turned their backs on him and said, oh, well, we'll sing a secular song. and really were taunting him. but there were a lot of examples where behavior didn't make sense. people were out in the park saying, um, it's judgment day, god is angry at white people, um, but they weren't saying it quite as directly as that. they were using scripture to try
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to illustrate what they meant. so we were interested in all those questions. and at some point -- >> and i find, i finally told susan that if she wrote a novel about it, she would sell a couple thousand copies, and if she wrote nonfiction about it, she could sell way more because the story of what actually happened was much more fascinating than anything that we could make up about it. and, and from that point on we started digging through all the libraries of charleston and throughout south carolina. we found frank dawson's papers at the duke university and found way more there than we ever expected to find. and every time we thought we knew what was going on, we would uncover a little more, and it got more fascinating and more fascinating. and then the stories kind of bloomed into the whole wiggins story about the upcoming apocalypse, basically, that was going to happen september 29th.
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and dawson's murder, and it just grew and grew. and we had fun all 11 years. it was amazing to us that after that amount of work we were still just fascinated with it. and, um, eager to get back in the libraries and to work on the prose. >> for more information on booktv's recent trip to charleston, south carolina, visit c-span.org/local content. >> with titles like slander, godless, guilty, and her latest, demonic, ann coulter has something to say. now sunday, august 7th, your chance to talk to, e-mail and tweet the new york time best-selling author and syndicated columnist ann coulter in depth for three hours starting at noon eastern live on booktv on c-span2.
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>> booktv is in charleston, south carolina. up next, a look at the u.s. customs house with author jason ryan. [inaudible conversations] >> we're standing in front of the u.s. customs house in downtown charleston n. the early 1980s, it served as headquarters for operation jackpot, one of the largest and first federal drug investigations in ronald reagan's war on drugs. ultimately, it accused and convicted more than 100 of south carolina's gentlemen marijuana smuggers, unique for their nonviolent methods and decisions to smuggle only hashish and marijuana. operation jackpot was unique for two things. one, it was a federal investigation that combined agents from many different agencies, the dea, the fbi, irs, u.s. customs, the atf and more. also operation jackpot was unique for using something called civil forfeiture laws to seize drug smugglers' access
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before they were even accused of the crimes they were convicted of. luxury properties before filing charges against them in court. the gentlemen marijuana smugglers had a long, successful run smuggling almost ten years without getting caught. but by 1983 the government was catching up with them and putting them behind bars. >> for more information on booktv's recent trip to charleston, south carolina, visit c-span.org/local content. >> for the next six hours, booktv will bring you freedom fest 2011. the annual conference was july 14th-16th in the las vegas. here's our schedule: ..

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